Nick Ellis

Affiliation(s)

University of Michigan: ELI, Psychology, Linguistics, Center for the Study of Complex Systems

University of Bangor: Honorary Research Fellow

Fields of Study

Cognition & Perception

Developmental Psychology

About

Nick Ellis is Professor of Psychology and Research Scientist in the English Language Institute. His research interests include language acquisition, cognition, emergentism, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, and psycholinguistics.

His research in second language acquisition concerns (1) explicit and implicit language learning and their interface, (2) usage-based acquisition and the probabilistic tuning of the system, (3) vocabulary and phraseology, and (4) learned attention and language transfer.

His emergentist research concerns include language as a complex adaptive system, networks analysis of language, scale-free linguistic distributions and robust learning, and computational modeling. Two recent books on these themes are: Language as a Complex Adaptive System (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, with Diane Larsen-Freeman), and Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (Routledge, 2008, with Peter Robinson).